This article is a translation of the original Finnish article: Energiatodistusrekisteri: näin tarkistat, onko rakennuksella energiatodistus
Energy certificate register: how to check whether a building has an energy certificate
The official energy certificate register is at www.energiatodistusrekisteri.fi. The register is nowadays maintained by Varke, the Housing Construction Centre of the Finnish State, to which ARA’s duties were transferred on 1.3.2025 – the register’s address did not change in the transition. The service is free of charge, and without logging in you can search for issued energy certificates (energiatodistus) and for qualified energy certificate assessors. The check typically interests a home buyer or tenant, an owner preparing a sale, and the board of a housing company (taloyhtiö) that wants to know whether the company’s certificate is up to date. In this article we explain how the search works, what the register shows for free and what a missing certificate means in practice. If the energy certificate is unfamiliar as a concept, first read what an energy certificate is.
The fastest way: check with a single search
The easiest route is the energy certificate check on our tools page. One piece of information is enough: the building’s address, property identifier (kiinteistötunnus), building identifier or the housing company’s name. Check the situation with our tool – or let us check for you: leave the property’s details on the page, and we will find out whether a valid certificate exists in the register and explain what the result means.
The public register in practice covers buildings with more than two apartments, so the search serves a housing company’s board, a property manager and a buyer of housing company shares best. We return to the special position of detached houses below.
How to search the official register directly
If you want to search Varke’s service directly yourself, do this:
- Go to www.energiatodistusrekisteri.fi and choose the energy certificate search. No login is needed, and the search is free of charge.
- Search for the building and open the certificate found. The public search shows a summary of the certificate, i.e. its first two pages, which contain the certificate’s key information.
- If you need information the public search does not show, you can send Varke an information request at energiatodistus.varke@gov.fi.
The same service also has an assessor search, where you can look up qualified energy certificate assessors by name or by region, as well as statistics on issued certificates. The assessor search is also useful when you want to make sure that a party offering a certificate is actually entitled to draw up certificates in the first place.
What the register shows for free – and what it does not
The public search is free of charge, but it does not show everything. It is good to know these limitations before interpreting a search result:
| Information | Visible in the public search? |
|---|---|
| The energy certificate of a building with more than two apartments (for example a block of flats or a larger terraced-house company) | Yes – a summary of the certificate is shown, i.e. its first two pages |
| The energy certificate of a detached or semi-detached house (1–2 apartments) | No – not shown for reasons of personal data protection, even if a certificate exists |
| A certificate drawn up before 1.5.2015 | No – the public search covers certificates drawn up from 1.5.2015 onwards |
| Qualified energy certificate assessors | Yes – by name or by region |
| Statistics on issued certificates | Yes |
For a housing company the register is therefore handy: for example, the existence of a block of flats’ certificate and its key information can be seen directly online without logging in. For the owner of a detached house the same search shows an empty result, which is not due to a missing certificate but to data protection – we return to this shortly.
Why do search results still talk about ARA?
Many guides, news articles and discussion forums still talk about ARA’s energy certificate register. The information is not wrong but outdated: ARA was wound down, and its duties – including maintaining the energy certificate register and supervising the certificates – were transferred on 1.3.2025 to Varke, which operates under the Ministry of the Environment. Old ara.fi links now redirect to varke.fi, and the register’s address has stayed the same, so even an old link takes you to the right place. We cover Varke and its new energy grant for housing companies in more detail in our article on the energy grant.
No certificate found for the building – what does it mean?
There are four common explanations for an empty search result, and none of them is automatically a warning sign.
A detached or semi-detached house never shows up in the search. Certificates for buildings with at most two apartments are not published in the register’s public search at all, so for a detached house an empty search result tells you nothing – a certificate may well exist and be valid. The surest way to find out is to ask the seller or to send Varke an information request – or to let us find out for you.
The building may not need a certificate. The Act on the energy certificate of buildings requires a valid certificate when a building or an apartment is sold or rented out: the indicator describing energy efficiency must be mentioned already in the sale or rental advertisement, the certificate must be available for viewing at showings, and it is handed over to the buyer or tenant. Some buildings, however, are exempt from the obligation, including buildings under 50 m², holiday homes not used for an accommodation business, and industrial and workshop buildings. The structure of the exemptions changed at the beginning of 2025, so the list may look different in older guides. Nor does a missing certificate directly lead to a fine: Varke first issues a request to comply and, if necessary, a warning. The current act can be read on Finlex, and we have gone through the exemptions in more detail in the article which buildings need an energy certificate.
The certificate may be older than the register. The public search covers certificates drawn up from 1.5.2015 onwards, so an older certificate cannot be found there. Since a certificate is valid for at most ten years, certificates drawn up before May 2015 have in practice already expired anyway – an old certificate beyond the search’s reach is therefore no longer valid. The register also does not store certificates drawn up under the so-called simplified procedure, which is used in certain special situations.
The certificate has not been obtained yet. If a sale or rental is coming up and there is no valid certificate, it pays to order one in good time before publishing the advertisement. In home sales the matter often comes up only when the estate agent asks for the certificate, by which time the schedule is already tight. We explain who usually obtains and pays for the certificate in the article who pays for the energy certificate.
A certificate was found – is it still valid?
An energy certificate is valid for at most ten years from the date it was drawn up, and if a new certificate is drawn up for the building, the old one expires at the same time. So check when the certificate was drawn up and whether it is still valid: for example, all certificates drawn up in 2015 have already expired, and many of those drawn up in 2016 are expiring in these very months. It is also worth remembering that an old but still valid certificate does not always reflect the building’s current state: if an energy renovation, for example a change of heating system, has been carried out after the certificate was drawn up, a new certificate may give a better energy class and support the sale. In a housing company, an expiring certificate should be put on the board’s agenda in good time – and if the company is planning an energy renovation with Varke’s grant, a new energy certificate is needed in any case at the latest when the grant is paid out. We explain what separates a carefully prepared certificate from a routine job in the article a high-quality energy certificate.
Check first, order if needed
The fastest route is therefore this: check the situation with our tool – or let us check for you. If there is no certificate or it has expired, we will draw up a new one promptly: an energy certificate may only be drawn up by a qualified assessor listed in the assessor register, and with us the certificates are prepared by professionals holding the advanced-level qualification certified by FISE. Take a look at our energy certificate service and submit a request for a quote, and we will tell you what your property needs.
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